Review of Recent Polling on Defense Spending and Deficit Reduction

Bottom line: Poll response hinges on policy context and background knowledge. Knowledge about the size of the US defense budget — especially relative to spending in other policy areas and the amounts spent on defense by other countries — prompts support for substantial reductions in the Pentagon’s budget. Also key is the relative weight that the public gives to economic and security concerns. The $100 billion annual roll-back in planned defense spending proposed by several deficit-reduction efforts accords with some poll results.

A recent poll on deficit reduction takes an interesting approach to querying the public about policy options: First it informs participants about actual spending levels in discretionary accounts and then asks them to apply reductions, account by account. The result: a mean reduction to annual discretionary spending of $146 billion. Of this, the participants take $121.8 billion out of the defense account. The lion share of the defense cut – $109.4 billion – was applied to the Pentagon’s base budget, which excludes war funding.

The poll was conducted in January by the Program for Public Consultation (PPC), a joint effort of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.

How does the PPC poll compare with others on defense spending and deficit reduction? A January poll conducted by CBS affirmed majority support for cutting defense as part of deficit reduction – 52% versus 44% – but also found that defense was not as popular a target as some other programs. The preference for cutting defense was completely reversed in a separate poll conducted by Gallup and USA Today, which found 57% opposed to deficit-related defense cuts. How to reconcile these results?

When moving from a three-choice to a two-choice question (cuts: “yes” or “no”), one might expect the “too little spending” and “just right” cohorts to band together and overwhelmingly oppose cuts by margins approaching 2:1. But this is not what the recent deficit reduction polls show, even when a majority is found to oppose cuts.

Much of the difference among the polls is due to context – policy context and information context. Economic concerns clearly predominate today. And the clamor for federal spending cuts is strong. In this context, support for constraining or rolling back military spending has grown stronger, too.

Of course, wording also matters. The CBS poll that found majority support for defense cuts used the phrase “reduce defense spending,” while the Gallup poll that found the reverse asked about cuts to “the military and national defense.” Mentioning the military may invoke a “support the troops” frame. And “the military” may have a more positive resonance with the public than does “defense” on its own. By contrast, the CBS poll’s option to “reduce defense spending” keeps the focus on the act of spending, which may remind participants that the point of the exercise is deficit reduction.

Most important: support for substantial cuts in the Pentagon budget grows dramatically when poll participants know the actual level of defense spending and know how it measures up relative to (i) spending in other areas and/or (ii) the amounts that other nations spend on defense. This is made clear in Rasmussen polls that test support for setting US defense spending as some multiple of what other nations spend. For instance, in the Rasmussen polls, 40% respond that the United States need not spend three times as much as any other country – although, in fact, it certainly spends at least five times as much. As the multiple goes up, support for spending goes down.